


stand back (watch it burn)

by anothercover



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bad Decisions, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Rough Sex, Shower Sex, some ensemble cast reactions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-04 03:42:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14584188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anothercover/pseuds/anothercover
Summary: Steve holds such undeniable power. One rousing speech over a loudspeaker and SHIELD had promptly started to rip itself into pieces with no evidence, on nothing more than the Captain’s say-so. Sam, out of the military – very possibly with an adrenaline itch that still needed scratching, but still – and willingly throwing himself back into the line of fire and potentially on the wrong side of the law because Steve was the one who had asked.  Seventy years of propaganda and politics, sleeping under the ice while he was built into something greater than any one man could ever be and it’s a power that he wields clumsily, sometimes, but he has always, always been aware of its existence and he’s tried – oh, Natasha knows how hard he has tried – to live up to it, to deserve the faith people hand him before he himself has actually earned it.And here at the end, all of it has been good for nothing.[Post-Infinity War. Aftermath.Major spoilers.]





	stand back (watch it burn)

  
  
  


The silence is punishingly brutal.

If the horror is beyond what a human mind is capable of processing, this silence is the evidence. There is no wailing, no pleading. There are no screams or tears or prayers from the survivors. There is only the sight of countless human bodies crumbling bloodlessly to ash on a scale too enormous to be believed. It is no hole over the Manhattan skyline; it is no violent outburst with a clear plan to counter. It cannot be contained and it cannot be understood. 

Natasha runs. 

There’s no point in trying to outrun it; she knows. If it will come for her, it’ll come, but she can taste her heart hurtling itself up the back of her desert-dry throat, bloody copper and rising bile. She is as helpless as everyone on the field, but she crashes through the brush because she will not be too late if it’s come for Steve.

If it’s come for Steve, she will look him in the eyes and she will lie to him on his way to the wind. She will promise him that he’s all right, that he’s just fine with every ounce of her gift for making bullshit believable. This flooding panic needs something to hook itself onto, her survivor’s soul bleating for a target and there are worse things in the world to latch onto than easing her best friend into death.

But by the time she makes it through the underbrush, she knows she won’t have to lie. Steve has fallen to his knees in a pile of what used to be James Barnes. Steve, crumpled and broken on the ground with Vision’s greying corpse in front of him and she presses her hands to her stomach because the vomit is sloshing and churning and trying to force its way up. It’s too big, it’s too much.

It’s over. 

They lost.  


  
****

**+**

  
****

In the immediate hours after, they stay in each other’s orbit. Steve touches the small of her back constantly, over and over again; if too much time passes without hearing his voice in the din of everything else, her pulse picks up and her head tracks a frantic little jerk until she can get a visual on him. It gets worse as the day wears on. By the time they’ve confirmed the final tally of everyone they’ve lost, her hip is permanently sealed to Steve’s and his hand has moved up from her back to cup her neck instead, just beneath her hairline.

They still have each other. They didn’t lose each other and in the wake of everything they have lost, it hardly feels like _something_ but Natasha tells herself that it’s not nothing, either.

They’re clingy. This is not the way Captain America and the woman who is effectively his long right arm have ever behaved with each other; it would be an embarrassing show of weakness if there was any space inside this day to cram in something as thoroughly pointless as embarrassment. Who would notice? And if they did – who’s left to care?

(Sam would have had plenty of commentary, Natasha knows. Sam would have rolled his eyes and run his mouth and she would have made a face at him and he would have known that underneath it, somewhere internally, she was laughing, because he could always get her to laugh even when she didn’t want to. Sam is – was – so fucking funny, always. She should have let him see that more often, shouldn’t have assumed he knew she was cracking up on the inside, should have given him the out-loud laugh when he had more than earned it.)

The world beyond Wakanda will be melting down into a sea of chaos. It’s more than they would be equipped for even if they were at full strength. There has never been so much nothing in front of Natasha – in front of any of them – in their lives. 

She dimly realizes that this is shock. 

This molasses pulsing through her veins, this slowed reaction time and her dead-eyed stares, this is because she has gone into shock, and so has everyone around her. She’s never seen shock on this broad a scope before – it’s strange, it is, she’s no novice to war or casualties and neither is Steve, neither is _Thor_ , but it’s settled over all of them and it won’t be knocked out by a few shots of whiskey and slow breathing. 

When Okoye calls Shuri “my queen” and M’Baku bends a knee in allegiance, Shuri vomits abruptly onto the ground in front of them. Natasha watches it splash onto her boots and feels nothing.  


  
****

**+**

  
****

The raccoon – Rocket – is drinking like it’ll be outlawed by dawn, runs through four bottles of something demonically potent with barely a breath in between. When he reaches for a fifth and Thor gently attempts to slow him down, he explodes into slurred shouting, teeth gnashing, rage and loss and grief too big to be contained in his small body. It’s too loud and chaotic, and it’s when Natasha finds herself wandering away from the group. Roaming.

The remaining Dora Milaje make no attempt to stop her exploration; the palace is as eerily silent as everywhere else. They’ve clustered around a still-frozen Shuri as though it matters that they have one thing left to defend. As though it means something.

She has a phone. Still. 

She always keeps this phone tucked somewhere into a discreet pocket of her suit and she still hasn’t changed out of it. There is one number programmed in, only one, and if the lines might be down right now, in the wake of – _this_ , she can’t know until she calls.

Which is why she doesn’t call. 

She wanders the hallways numbly and rubs a thumb over the zipper protecting those three inches of hard black plastic. There is no calculation that allows all five of them survival and she considers, for a moment, the horrifying possibility that the only one left is Nate, who wouldn’t know how to pick up the burner even if he heard it. Helpless and small and scared.

And so she knows she has to call. 

She needs the answer. Needs to know if she has to find _someone_ to check on the baby, because that is the actual worst-case scenario, worse than a completely empty patch of land, needs to know if it has to be her. 

But if Natasha confirms that Clint is gone with the rest of the people she’s loved – if she learns he dissolved the way James did, lost like Wanda’s sad eyes, if he screamed in his last moments like Vision – she will not be able to stay standing. 

She is good to no one if she can’t stay standing.  


  
****

**+**

  
****

There are still bits of their friends in her hair and eyelashes.

It’s barely anything; spots of thickish brown dust, not any kind of recognizable human remnants. Natasha has been drenched in blood and viscera countless times since childhood. She has sawed through bone and seen loose organs roll out of an open chest cavity; an alien carcass has burst in her face while her mouth was open. When has she ever been someone to flinch at the messy parts of war?

As soon as the thought occurs to her, though, it’s too _beyond_. It’s too much to think about, this lightweight odorless brown ash – it is the _absence_ of blood and bone and viscera and if it stays on her body for another second – 

Her heart rate starts to pick up again, pulsing at the same panic-laced stutter it did on the field. She wants to claw at her skin, beat her hair like it’s a blanket she’s trying to shake sand from after a day at the beach, and it doesn’t let up until she finds a bathroom with a shower in it. 

It’s a nice shower, one of a handful of enormous private stalls attached to a wide room that looks like an indoor training space. Maybe the Dora run their workouts here. Maybe it’s their equivalent of the training room in New York, with its floor-to-ceiling windows with the view she used to love. 

Natasha isn’t quite sure where she’s ended up, honestly, how far she’s descended or ascended. She’s not quite sure how long she’s been wandering. 

She strips out of the suit and notices, in a detached sort of way, that her fingers are trembling. She is so much more meticulous than this, always – hangs her suit up and examines it for places it might need repairs, shines her boots, lays her weapons out in a straight line to clean and care for them, to restock and recharge and now – now. 

Now she lets everything fall in a pile on the floor, then kicks it out of her way. She wears a ribbed undershirt and a pair of Clint’s old boxers printed with pineapples underneath; she’s sweat all the way through her shirt and now it’s dried uncomfortably, hardened and stuck to her skin in uncomfortable patches. She peels everything off and drops them unceremoniously to the ground beside the rest of everything useless, everything that held nothing back, guns and tasers and batons and knives and a suit that kept her safe from even so much as a single scratch.

How is there nothing on her body to mark this?

The water from the overhead nozzle is warm immediately, like standing in a torrent of rain with no burst of cold. There’s no shampoo, but there’s pale blue gel that smells like body wash; she overfills her hands with it and begins to scour her skin. 

Steam fills the stall, swirls against the glass door, and she fills her hands again, and again, watches the blue suds swirl around the drain.

 _There were six of us on the ground in New York_ , she thinks. _Only six. And we held it. We held it._

What was any of it even for.

Her reverie is interrupted by the bathroom door flying off its hinges, kicked clear across the room and into the wall with a crash that feels deafening in the wake of all this unnatural silence. 

Natasha doesn’t have time to form a counterattack before the stall door is ripped from the frame. Steam rushes out into the open room in wave of botanical-smelling humid heat as the glass breaks when the door drops down, a rainfall of shards scattering across the floor in every direction like a spill of ice chips. One of them skims her ankle, a quick sting that’s gone as fast as it bit.

Steve is standing in front of her, as full of rage as she has ever seen him. His entire body is trembling with it. 

“What the fuck, Natasha!” he roars, eyes wild and bloodshot. His hair is pushed back from his temples; she can see the way his pulse is pounding. “How could you – why would you – ”

Natasha blinks. “Steve, I – ”

“I turned around and you were _gone_!” he rages. “I couldn’t find you anywhere, I thought – Jesus fucking Christ, what if it had been a second wave, what if nobody _saw you go down_ , you were there one second and _then you were gone, Nat_.”

His chest heaves with it and she realizes with a sharp spike of shock that Steve Rogers is close to weeping right in front of her. Because of her.

She doesn’t think; she doesn’t hesitate. She stretches out her arms and Steve falls into them like an overtired child, like he isn’t a foot taller than Natasha and twice as heavy. He doubles over and pulls her into his body, the water drenching his clothes in seconds as he clings to her, pressing his face into the side of his neck. 

“Don’t do that, please don’t do that again,” he begs into her wet skin, and it breaks something loose in her body, it’s the first thing she has _felt_. 

Natasha abruptly realizes what a safe harbor the shock was, how protected and sheltered it was trying to keep her, because the moment she feels one thing, she feels _all of it_ and it is too much to feel. 

She opens her mouth and wants to howl, but nothing makes its way out and she settles for biting Steve’s shoulder, muffling her silent screams into him. 

“I’m sorry,” she forces out, and his hands tighten at her waist. “I didn’t think.” How could she not have known what he would feel when he looked around and didn’t see her, when he called out her name and she didn’t call back?

“I thought I lost you too,” he gasps. “Nat – Nat, I – ”

“I’m here,” she promises. “I’m still here.”

He’s quiet, no noise but the water thundering down around him, but she hears his next words clearly. “He said my name like I could stop it.”

 _Captain America is on threatwatch?_ Bruce asked years ago, skepticism high and the eye roll Natasha had been suppressing made its way into her voice when she’d told him _We all are_. Noted cynic Bruce Banner couldn’t understand how Steve Rogers could possibly be seen as a threat and that was exactly what made him one. 

Steve holds such undeniable power. One rousing speech over a loudspeaker and SHIELD had promptly started to rip itself into pieces with no evidence, on nothing more than the Captain’s say-so. Sam, out of the military – very possibly with an adrenaline itch that still needed scratching, but still – and willingly throwing himself back into the line of fire and potentially on the wrong side of the law because Steve was the one who had asked. Seventy years of propaganda and politics, sleeping under the ice while he was built into something greater than any one man could ever be and it’s a power that he wields clumsily, sometimes, but he has always, always been aware of its existence and he’s tried – oh, Natasha knows how hard he has tried – to live up to it, to deserve the faith people hand him before he himself has actually earned it.

And here at the end, all of it has been good for nothing. 

She pulls back to look at him, to frame his face with his beard prickling beneath her hands. She can’t cry. The tears won’t come; they’ve never come naturally to her, not really, not when they’re not part of a ploy and a cover, but there is something thick and wet in her throat that feels like it should have turned into tears. That would have if she were just a fraction less herself.

“Like I could stop it,” he repeats. _His_ eyes are wet. “I’ve watched him go down twice, you’d think I would know how to handle it this time around.”

It occurs to Natasha, vaguely, that she’s naked and he’s clothed, but it feels so distant and unimportant. It doesn’t feel like a boundary cross; it feels like any normal social construct blew away with Thanos and a snap. 

“If I call Clint and,” she starts, but she can’t finish the thought. Steve’s face changes in a way that makes her close her eyes against his grief.

“Could have just let Viz – he was ready, he’d made his choice, but I was,” he says, as though he’s pulling the words out of his insides in big bloody handfuls. 

“ _Stop_ , oh stop,” Natasha says, and tips his face down to hers to kiss his forehead gently. “It was too late before he touched down, Steve, it was already too late, we blew it before we began.”

Steve makes a ragged, moaning noise, a miserable sound of loss that she never wants to hear out of him again and she stops it with her own mouth. 

It’s not a kiss. Or it’s not the intent, at least, it’s not something that she would count, but he’s making that _noise_ and it won’t stop and if she forcibly presses his lips with hers, she can force it back down; she is the cork and he is the bottle.

But then tongue is in her mouth and it flips on a heartbeat. It’s harder than it seems like it should be, to share a close-mouthed kiss; lips always want to part, they know the way they’re supposed to move and so Steve’s tongue is sweeping against hers. 

Another heartbeat flips and he’s suddenly sucking at her mouth, kissing her in hungry gulps, rougher than she would have imagined Steve knew how to kiss if she had ever really imagined it. If she’d thought about it longer than a few hours in a car en route to New Jersey four years ago, mulling on it in a clinical sort of way. 

She’s kissing him back. 

Not even on autopilot – they are kissing because kissing is better than drowning and his hands on her body are holding her inside it, keeping her from floating off into space again. Natasha hates the sensation of mental floating; she likes to be grounded and no one has his roots more firmly planted in the earth than her Steve. If he doesn’t let go, there’s nowhere she can stray. 

His beard is rough against her cheeks, the weight of his wet clothes dragging him down. It’s hard to kiss him on this angle; she’s so much shorter than he is, and he seems to realize it in the same moment because he picks her up and lifts her higher. He doesn’t press her against the wall, just holds her up with her legs dangling until she folds them around him and hooks her ankles together just above his ass.

A curl of heat unfolds somewhere low in her body. A sharp spike of arousal singing all the way through her veins and the edge of how very much this is the wrong place, the wrong time, the wrong _people_ sparks it higher, keeps it threading. 

She bites Steve’s mouth and he jerks his head back, blue eyes blown wide in - something. She’s not sure. It’s not confusion, it’s not concern. He’s here in it with her. 

“Harder,” she growls. If it hurts, she can understand it. 

He doesn’t argue. He slides one hand to the back of her head to bring her back in, crushing his mouth to hers – holding her up on the strength of one arm and her thighs splayed on either side of him. He grips her hard enough to leave bruises and it thrills her, makes her scratch deep into his neck, pulling a sharp _hiss_ from him that she swallows.

Thinking is too much. Thinking is unbearable and she pushes her hands between their bodies and hitches herself high against his abs, enough that she can work them down and rip into his pants, shoving them just far enough down his thighs with the back of her heels. She gets her fingers around him and doesn’t think, doesn’t think about how this is Steve’s cock in her hand and she’s stroking him harder, stoking the fire, demanding something she would never have asked for in _any other circumstance but this specific one_.

Steve doesn’t ask if she’s sure. 

Some part of her retains it – careful, sweet Steve Rogers, all big hands and gentleness, who has rubbed the soreness from her back after shitty jobs and fallen asleep on her shoulder, shielded her from danger and thrown her into the air – Steve who in any other circumstance but this specific one would be seeking confirmation of her sureness every step of the way, asks nothing and pushes his cock against her eagerly. 

They’re moving together on base instinct, rutting like there’s something left to fight. Like if they hurl themselves hard enough into each other, if they break something here, the clock will accept it as penance and wind itself back. 

Steve snaps his hips up and screws into her on a hot, hard push, bottoms out entirely on just the one thrust with his wet army pants only halfway down his thickly muscled thighs. 

For a second – a long, frozen second, they stare at each other in something like shock. Steve looks stunned by his own audacity, the barest flicker of fear that he’s trespassed and she can’t stand that look, she can’t, not on Steve, _not ever_ and she kicks his lower back with her interlocked ankles, urging him on. 

“I said _harder_ ,” she snarls, and that’s when Steve comes back to her. 

Thinking. This is not about thinking, this is body and blood and soul screaming _I’m alive I’m still alive I’m A L I V E_ and his big hands bracket her hips, pulling her up and dragging her back down as she grips his shoulders and holds on for the motherfucking ride. 

She’s never seen Steve’s cock before. She still hasn’t, but she’s taking it just the same, every thick inch with water streaming in her eyes and soap slicking up her skin. He doesn’t even need the wall for support – they’re perfectly balanced in the middle of the stall with nothing to cling onto but each other, her hips jolting and twisting and fighting their way into the rhythm his _arms_ , of all things, are setting. 

A cry twists its way out of her at the sudden bump and grind of her clit against the cut of his hip, the sharp shock that it can feel good right now – that anything can feel good right now, let alone this good – and Natasha’s mouth drops open in a series of needy little pants. 

They’re noises she makes instead of words, because the only words she has right now is _hurt me hurt me I want it to hurt_ and even when they are so committed to not thinking, to losing themselves inside this, to turning the rest of the world off for every perfect twitch of her cunt around him – no. 

That’s not a thing she’ll let herself say to Steve. 

Not today.

Their eyes are locked as he bounces her onto his cock, again and again, every sound swallowed up in the thunder of the showerhead. It’s desperate and needy and it shouldn’t feel good but she _feels_ \- it feels – 

Steve tips his forehead against hers, scrapes his teeth over her chin. 

“Can you come like this?” he asks in a hoarse rattle, and those words out of _Steve_ streak through her hotly. 

“I – don’t – know,” she pants. What she means to say is that she’s not sure she can come today at all, but it feels nice in spite of that, it’s fierce and it’s urgent and she needed – she wanted – orgasm hardly seems the point, but Steve grunts and drops her full weight to one arm like he’s doing a bicep curl to rub at her clit with his thumb. 

It’s graceless and too hard, the callus at the pad of it too rough for the pressure he’s using, but it pushes the orgasm out of her in a burst that she didn’t see coming. Pulled from her body like poison sucked from an open wound and Steve follows along behind her with a throaty groan and buries his teeth in her shoulder, bites hard enough to leave an imprint. 

It’s an endless moment before he lowers her back down, before her bare feet come to rest on the slick warm tile. Her knees shake for longer than she’d like before steadying. Her cunt is sore and her nipples feel raw from rubbing up against the front of his shirt.

They stare at each other, breathless and aching. Eventually, Steve reaches out to rub his thumb across her lower lip, his eyes big and sad and sorrowful. 

“What now?” he asks, quietly. 

_What now_ , Natasha thinks. 

_Yeah._

_What happens now?_  


  
  
  


  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> a present for my very sweet friend who made me love the stupid Guardians and whose only note is always "make it sadder".


End file.
